I just stopped by today and the 1st thing I get to read is the announcement from Greg about SimsHost being shut down this June. I'm stunned.

On the "emotional" side : I will seriously miss SimsHost and (more importantly) the good folks here at Hullabaloo. It was nice to find a place you could ask a question & NOT risk having your head removed.

On the "practical" side : What's going to happen to all the (awesome) sites that SimsHost hosts??? Will they be shut down, moved or....????? There are so many great designers here! I hate to see them gone forever!

Before I go on about how we got here and where everyone is going, I should mention something here: If you have a current SimsHost subscription, don't hesitate to run it into the ground. If we got the changes to the accounting software right, you should be able to continue to download even after your balance goes to zero. So for the next two months, if you think you might want it, download it.

(If that doesn't work, let me know here at the Hullabaloo.)

Now back to the subject at hand...

Yeah, it's not easy for us, either, but the reality of the checkbook sometimes takes precedence; and maybe it's not such a bad thing.

The real clincher was when I seriously dug into the books to see if we could trim our costs any more. It turned out revenues from subscriptions had fallen so low that the majority of the costs (secure server, bank costs, taxes, Thawte license, accounting system, and so on) all involved the function of collecting money for subscriptions. The cost of the excess bandwidth and web server resources needed to display and deliver the stuff were still significant, but had become secondary.

So, when faced with the decision on whether or not to try increasing the subscription price to make ends meet, it seemed silly to ask people for more money just so they could have the privilege of giving us money!

I also noticed that, once the huge accounting system and its database are taken out of the equation, our current use of system resources and bandwidth could be handled by a pair Networks high-volume account on a shared server, which costs just under 10% as much as our hot-rod dedicated server. That made it easy to decide to let the profit-motivated commercial sites like The Sims Resource and Mod The Sims 2 worry about subscriptions.

What really happened is a change in the Sims community. Five years ago, it was impossible to keep a popular Sims site on line with just voluntary donations. A few sites squeaked by, but for every "free" site that made it, dozens were driven off the net after the Dotcom Disaster. The only subscription site at that time was Mall of the Sims, and it wasn't too popular. We hosted as many free sites as we could on Moon Sims, but eventually ran out of server resources; and that's why we started SimsHost.

Nowadays, at least a few people have come to realize that it takes a lot of money and effort to run a busy Sims site, and among them at least a few are willing to help. Only one out of a thousand people actually donate money to free sites, but these days it's enough if the webmaster is reasonably frugal. Five years ago, a webmaster was lucky in one in a million visitors deigned to click that little PayPal button.

(I know that there are a few vocal people who actively promote the idea that only very wealthy people should be allowed to have Sims fan sites, and that there's something wrong with asking other fans to help pay the bills. Obviously, I strongly disagree with that elitist mentality. They had no influence on the decision to close SimsHost. If anything, quite the opposite.)

The good news is the Sims fan community has matured enough that it's really possible to keep even a very busy site alive with just a busker jar. I think the advent of bulletin board systems that enable all fans to easily share their work had a lot to do with this; they build a feeling of community and encourage social contact among fans at the same time.

Sites Status After the Shutdown

These sites will have their own independent hosting, maybe under a different name:

ArtSIMZ

Empire Sim

Pompkyn's Sims Boutique

Simmage

The webmasters of these sites plan to put their stuff on Sun Sims:

Candace's Sim Bazaar (Simsational Sandy's)

Enchanted Sims Curio Company

House Depot

Job Two Sims (might put stuff in the general public area)

Otherworld Sims (Sexpot Sims)

Sim Republic

Tom's Sims Stuff (might put stuff in the general public area)

Wooden Simolean

I also plan to rehost the Hullabaloo, completely intact except that most of the downloads will have to move over to Sun Sims. It will be at the same URL, hullabaloo.simshost.com, even though the main simshost.com domain will be nothing but a placeholder to host a few subdomains. I also plan to keep alive other simshost.com subdomain names, especially thesims2.simshost.com (because it has all the pictures for my stories) and maybe the Sim City Community College (because it's fun).

I haven't heard from the other webmasters hosted by SimsHost, so I can't say anything about them. If the webmasters don't do anything else, those sites will simply vaporize on June 1.

So what the heck is Sun Sims?

I don't intend for Sun Sims to be a replacement for SimsHost. In fact, I'm almost hesitant to mention Sun Sims and SimsHost in the same message because I don't want people to think there's any relationship between the two.

Sun Sims is a whole separate site, just a little personal fannish site that I intend to keep 100% free, albeit eventually with a begging button. I would have done Sun Sims even if SimsHost were still viable. I've long been a strong supporter of donation-supported fan communties and have been happy to contribute to them, both financially and by sharing my Sims stuff on the boards. I've also been suffering from an acute case of vBulletin envy ever since I saw the outstandingly well-managed vBulletin boards at Insimenator and InsimAdult.

Still, now that we have it, Sun Sims provides a convenient landing zone for some of the artists on SimsHost as well as for anyone else who'd like to share Sims fan creations, so the timing of it is very fortuitious, indeed.

Before I go on about how we got here and where everyone is going, I should mention something here: If you have a current SimsHost subscription, don't hesitate to run it into the ground. If we got the changes to the accounting software right, you should be able to continue to download even after your balance goes to zero. So for the next two months, if you think you might want it, download it.

Good idea! I haven't heard from Grandma in a very long time so I don't know if her stuff will still be available after June 1.

I'm kind of eager to have a good operational test to make sure that people can keep downloading even after their account balances go to zero. I want to make sure that the folks who helped pay the bills can still get all the stuff while it's available.